2 out, Lineout to the pitcher

With one hundred and sixty two games played by 30 teams, there's a lot of baseball to watch. After a certain date, let's say September first, there are certain teams who play just as much baseball as they did in the other months, but there isn't much of a reason to watch it. When the words 'mathematically eliminated' come up all the time after the name of your favourite team, it isn't easy to know why you are watching. The twilight of the season makes us look for justifications to keep watching the also-rans.

The first reason I often hear to compel me to watch a late season game of a poor team is that they can play 'spoiler'. 'Spoiler' resembles baseball, but with the emphasis on helping out a team that isn't even in the building by beating up on their competition for them. Which is all well and good, but I don't often enjoy it. Why? Well, often the only reason my team gets to wear the coveted 'spoiler' hat and jacket, is because their lack of success has led to them having to take off their 'contender' hat and jacket and put them in the closet for next year. 'Contender' is just so much more fashionable than 'Spoiler' brand. The other thing that strikes me is that the teams that don't play well are not likely to spoil anything with any regularity. Often they get schooled by the better teams as to why they weren't on the list of better teams earlier in the year. Bad teams do not improve because the leaves change colour.

Totally Astrotious

It has been a rough four years for the Houston baseball fan. Four losing years, and then the announcement that the team would be changing leagues, which will remove all of the team's traditional rivals from its schedule. That can't help to sell tickets, can it?

I was hanging around at NotGraphs the other day and the Astros were the subject of a recent post.  If you are a baseball fan, and haven't hung out at NotGraphs, you are definitely missing out. If you are in the mood for a little baseball related bric-a-brac, it is a one stop shop. It's also a free shop, where you can take home the memory of a .gif or unedited tweet, or even enjoy a little Dick Allen in great works of literature, for no initiation or membership fees.

The Astro's post in question was this one. And someone in the comments thought it might be helpful, perhaps even enlightening, to find all the other instances of the Astro's that were .gif-able, and to put them in one spot. I don't thing this was suggested with the Houston Astros fanbase in mind, because I would have to believe that putting all of the Astro's moments together like this, is a form of torture any real fan. Especially one who is watching and hoping that they suddenly turn it around. If you are one of those fans, this is your chance to avoid the train wreck. The rest of you can join me after the jump.

A Living Institution

Vin Scully is not a legendary base ball broadcaster, he is the legend of baseball broadcasting itself. If you want to know what it sounded like to hear the Don Larsen perfect game call in the 1956 World Series, one of the voices that broadcasted that game was Vin Scully's. If you want to hear one of the smoothest, most information packed modern broadcasts, listen to a Dodger home game, called by Vin Scully and only Vin Scully.

Now, I could probably point out that Vin has been baseball's great constant voice, and that he has been a Dodger employee longer than they have been the Los Angeles Dodgers. That, all by itself, is magical. Like Vin Scully, and his legacy, there's still more magic to come. Vin Scully remains happily unretired.

Vin is hardly phoning it in, either. In this season alone, he came up with a more descriptive term for the outfield shift, he learned about twitter, still thinks fast enough on his feet to lip read and edit a manager's profanity on the fly. He took a picture with Giancarlo Stanton. The young Mr. Stanton noted that meeting Vin was on his 'bucket list'. Are you an item on someone's bucket list? I didn't think so.

The baseball gods, (who control all that is uncertain in the game I love), can be fickle, but one would assume that they are pleased with having Mr. Scully as their standard bearer. Since he is not a player, the baseball gods cannot offer up a spectacular catch, or a walkoff win to Mr. Scully. They have given him the chance to call some of the greatest moments in the game. Perhaps not knowing what to get Vin this year, the baseball gods got him a bobblehead.

Now, that's really nice, but these aren't the baseball grandmas or baseball cousins working the magic here. Anybody can get a bobblehead made, but only the baseball gods can work the magic as you are coming down on the field to get the bobblehead.

From twitter:

And from the Dodgers Instagram account.

Yes, everything went exactly as well as you would expect for Vin Scully in Dodger Stadium. Plus a rainbow.

Top of the 7th: Flyout, LF (Deep Left)

A great catch is like watching girls go by; the last one you see is always the prettiest. - Bob Gibson

I'm going to go back in time a little bit here, but only about a week, to August 12th, 2012. (This blog is a labour of love, and other labours have not allowed me the time to come to this earlier.) It was in the 7th inning, and the Toronto Blue Jays held a comfortable 6 run lead over the visiting New York Yankees. Casey McGehee was the second batter in the inning, Curtis Granderson having reached base on an infield single.

McGehee launched a 2-0 pitch from Brad Lincoln over the head of Rajai Davis in left field.

To really understand what happened next, we have to add a little bit of context to Rajai Davis and his playing style. Two days earlier, Davis lost a ball in the lights at his home park, which is not unheard of, but certainly unusual. He often takes a wrong first step on fly balls, but uses his blazing running speed to overcome most of his mistakes. His throwing arm is unremarkable, which is why he is in left field, as Colby Rasmus represents a superior option in centre. Davis often appears just a bit indecisive in the outfield. He's certainly a step up from Eric Thames, and worlds apart from Adam Lind, but how he will play the bounce on a ball over his head is always a lingering question.

A Long Season

It is a long season.

You have probably heard that more times than you can count, if you are a baseball fan. It is, mathematically, the longest season of any professional sport. 162 games in 6 months, each lasting 3-4 hours, give or take an hour here and there. That's the most time spent on the field of any sport. So, we hear, quite often, about the long season.

The length of the season, just by adding up days, doesn't really approach the problem of the Long Season, though. Those 162 games are played six or seven days in a row, on a regular basis. The limit on the number of consecutive games played? Let me give you the official wording:

(12) No Club shall be scheduled, or rescheduled if practicable, to
play more than 20 consecutive dates without an open day. A rainedout
game may be rescheduled to an open date in the same series, or
to an open date at the end of the same series, if (a) the open date is
a road off-day for the visiting Club, and (b) the rescheduling does
not result in the home team playing more than 24 consecutive dates
without an open day.

Yes, twenty day in a row are possible in the regular conduct of business in the MLB. Have you ever worked twenty days in a row at your job? Even if your job isn't the most demanding in the world, how would you think of your job at the end of a twenty day stretch. I would call it a grind. I might include a few curse words before the word 'grind', but 'grind' would be my general feeling.

Baseball is a long grind.

On The Flip Side

In baseball, sometimes the uniform becomes part of the player. It isn't something that announces itself. Often, it is the sort of thing that comes to light at the end of a long career. The first one that springs to mind is Babe Ruth.

In your mind, there he is, in pinstripes, with the overlapping NY on his chest. I can't imagine any more lasting image of the Babe. It's like he was a Yankee through and through. Born at home plate in New York. After all, Yankee Stadium was The House That Ruth Built. Of course, that picture is not really reflective of Ruth's career at all.

Six years in Boston at the beginning of his career, a dominant lefthander on the mound. Funny, but we rarely picture him that way. Maybe it makes sense, because Ruth rewrote the rules of hitting in those pinstripes. Odd, though, that the Red Sox spent almost a century breaking a 'curse' of a man rarely pictured in their uniform.

This is from flipflopflyball.com, which you, being a baseball fan, should have visited many times already.

The players of the past, through the late 1960's, became one with their uniforms by virtue of the way baseball conducted its business. The reserve clause dictated that players could be retained indefinitely by one team, and cheaply too! Great players were destined for long careers in one colour.
Musial in Cardinal Red, Koufax in Dodger Blue.  It is natural to us now, but maybe it would have been different in an era where changing teams came naturally when the highest bidder came calling. When baseball moved through the 1970, 80s and 90s, into collective bargaining and free agency, the thought of a player in one uniform and only one uniform became much, much rarer. Many players now seem to change teams like it's a contest to collect the most different shirts. Matt Stairs, Eric Hinske, Jim Thome, Octavio Dotel, I have no lasting impression of any logo or number on their backs.

1-3-6-2 Double Play, and Go Ahead Run- SB, E1

The New York Yankees are...

If I start a sentence with those words, and you are a baseball fan, there is some automatic filler you will end it with. It depends what kind of fan you are. If you are a Yankee fan, it likely ends with "...baseball's greatest team.", or something else overly self congratulatory. Even if you are not a Yankee fan, there is still, I am sure, a way you end that sentence, almost automatically. Why? Because the Yankees are an indelible part of baseball history. You can't be a baseball fan and not have thought about the Yankees, a lot. You have surely imagined your team beating them, because, except for a couple of seemingly brief periods in their history, they have always been the team to beat. If you have ever imagined your team winning it all, at some point, the New York Yankees were the team they had to go through to get there.

I am not a Yankee fan, not by a long shot, but I, too, have an automatic ending to that sentence. When I hear "The New York Yankees are...." my brain finishes "too good at baseball." That's all, if they were just like other teams, we could all laugh off the 200 million dollar payroll and the pinstripes. Sadly, we can't laugh at them, not in the long run, because they win.